3 months...and you have none of the hard bits, your system doesn't scale, and you lack the complex features (will you be able to add them? Probably not). But that's fine if you never want it to go much beyond the current system - you've made the perfect choices if your system was easy to build as you wanted it, and would be hard to change: it means you've achieved what you were aiming at with optimal efficiency. The fact that JGF was intended to do a lot more than your site forced certain different decisions. You ought to open your mind to that possibility and pay more attention to what the differences are, and what the long-term effects of your own decisions might be, rather than casting aspersions.

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IMO, Java is better suited for programs.. not webpages. But hey, just an opinion.

I guess you think you know better than most global corporates then, who use J2EE intensively (and often exclusively) to build webpages.

I know about designing and building systems, it's my profession. Lots of issues affected the choices behind JGF's eventual implementation - I spent a couple of months just thinking about it before starting. With hindsight, i'd still do it much the same way again next time - although I'd be tempted not to use NIO at all, given the hassle of working around bugs and inadequacies both in NIO and in the things I was interfacing it to. e.g. it is frustrating quite how many OSS projects completely ignore NIO even today - despite my offers to several to partially convert their codebases.

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So far I havent had any I/O problems (or any other unexplainable bugs) with PHP.

Yes, my optimism that after a couple of years in production use Sun's NIO fully worked, and that after 3 years using it in the GrexEngine I'd seen all the exceptions that mattered, was - in hindsight - largely misplaced. NIO is considerably lower quality than my previous experiences of Sun standard java API's; they've not been this bad since 1.0.x IME (which were worse, IIRC). I still believe in it strongly, but it's just not ready for production use, except in narrow deployments where you're only hitting a small subsection of the bugs - or in situations where you have hte manpower and time to make custom workarounds each time you hit a new NIO bug.

3 months...and you have none of the hard bits, your system doesn't scale, and you lack the complex features (will you be able to add them? Probably not)...

Since when do you know the inner workings of my system and how it "scales"? When I last checked, I, being the only coder, know exactly what goes on behind the scenes.. I've done a superb job of keeping it simple for the user, yet keeping it extendible for me. Just because I don't have tons of news posts that say stuff like "bug here, bug there.. sorry! server down AGAIN" doesn't mean my system isn't complex - so check your facts. I just keep all the technical stuff where it belongs.. and the games in front of my users.

The fact about the "long term decisions" doesn't change the fact that I had a stable site and layout out in 3 months -*by myself* - *without requiring donations*. How many layouts did JGF go through...? Why does JGF cost so much when there are so many free ways to make a site? I pay $4/mo for hosting.. the *volunteered* donations thus far have covered that for the next year or 2 and bought me a domain.

I guess you think you know better than most global corporates then, who use J2EE intensively (and often exclusively) to build webpages...

I dont claim to be a corporate genius of any kind, I simply stated an opinion.. I know opinions that are against yours are tough to swallow. Just because a corporation uses something doesn't always mean its *the* way to go. PHP development is faster and less buggy than any servlet I've ever come across... and it's not like corporations have ignored PHP (it is likely to be one of the most popular serverside languages around)

i.e. everything (that was already working at any point) is now working.

FYI, to whoever recommended Apache Commons FileUpload months ago - I've ended up using it . At the time IIRC I said it had a clean looking API although it had no NIO compatibility (major bad point) and I didn't want to have to go down the full-servlet-compatibility route either. Fortunately, it only requires the smallest of J2EE compatibility, and - unlike Jetty's built-in MultiPartRequest class - it (so far) fully works.

In classic Apache fashion, the user-guide on the front page uses entirely deprecated methods so I'm not sure how the new replacements are supposed to be used, but the deprecated versions appear to work fine for now .

Since when do you know the inner workings of my system and how it "scales"?

I know what a LAMP server is capable of and what it is not capable of.

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I just keep all the technical stuff where it belongs.. and the games in front of my users.

Excellent. I'm mainly doing this for the benefit of everyone else. If Java Unlimited serves a valuable purpose, I'm happy.

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Why does JGF cost so much when there are so many free ways to make a site?

Because 20Mb games eat into b/w rather quickly (I have the b/w logs to prove this, from back when the site was just 3 pages of HTML), cheap servers go down like a tarts knickers (very bad for keeping players bothering to come back to the site), and hosting java gameservers is not easy on PHP hosting (something high on the todo list). Amongst many other reasons, but those 3 come to mind off the top of my head.

Hey, blah^3, I noticed a bug in your site. If you try to log in and your don't get your password in correctly, i'm taken to a page that says:

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Please contact the admin / dev-team

Copy and paste everything below this line when contacting them

Throwable:java.lang.Error: Service com.grexengine.cms.core.CMSAuthenticationService returned a null response; this is illegal, please contact service authorLine Source File283 In bAsynchronousService.java384 ...called from bModule.java595 ...called from Thread.java

It's time to prove to your friends that your worth a damn. Sometimes that means dying; sometimes that means killing a whole lotta people.

I couldn't use the LWJGL 0.98 from the "Extensions"-list because it failed with a security error (haven't saved the stack trace, sorry).

After uploading LWJGL by myself, the Jars are listed multiple times. This was already broken some month ago...however, this doesn't seem to hurt.

The jnlp works, but it's "executed" two times (this happens with all other hosted games that i've tried too), i.e. it's downloading all the jars, downloads them again and THEN it finally starts the game.

The html-source code is cluttered with a lot of rants why this and that doesn't work and how stupid the guys from Microsoft, Apache.org and MySQL are. This is very bad style IMHO.

Thanks for the bug reports. I know Mazon has been testing / improving the LWJGL hosted copy off and on - there's a problem, though, that certs are expensive and LWJGL doens't ahve a signing cert.

The rest is currently in the "if it works, it's going to be left alone for a while, even though I'd prefer to fix it properly" state. I wasn't aware of the double-downloading (never seen that myself, on any of several OS's and different locations) - but that's due to be replaced enitrely by the versioned webstart protocol in the future, so doesnt seem worth doing too much with it now.

Blah, is there any chance for us to add some other property in jnlp file, for example,-Dorg.lwjgl.opengl.Window.undecorated=true ?That could be really handy, not to be constrained with only three properties....

I have another suggestion I noticed one thing is unpractical. I broke my Monstrumo game into 7 jars, so that people will only download minor changed part when I update something, not all. But: in order to work properly, jnlp file have to have my code class first (that is one with main class) on the list. I noticed thet when I delete my code class to replace it with new one, the new one drops on the end of list in jnlp file. So I have to upload all 7 jar again and people will have to dowload them locally again. Also, when I add one by one jar, sometimes 3rd or 4th jar jumps in first place in jnlp, so I have to spend a lot of time until jnlp is like it should be. It would be great if we could just select one of our jars with checkbox and make it to be first on the list in jnlp. Hope it's possible.

I just uploaded CroAsteroids. I had so much trouble doing it...what the site definitely needs is FAQ and a Common Problems section. I suppose you are aware of that but lack time all together. It's a big project running a site like that, financially too.

I wonder if sending a letter to Sun or whomever want Java to be promoted and asking them for a small donation would be a good idea. It does not hurt to try. Java might be the future of gaming and projects like JGF and it is in Sun's interest to see it happen. What's your look on that?

Blah, is there any chance for us to add some other property in jnlp file, for example,-Dorg.lwjgl.opengl.Window.undecorated=true ?That could be really handy, not to be constrained with only three properties....

you can also use that flag in code and not need to put it the jnlp using :-

Blah, is there any chance for us to add some other property in jnlp file, for example,-Dorg.lwjgl.opengl.Window.undecorated=true ?That could be really handy, not to be constrained with only three properties....

I will add a generic propety adder at some point.

Bear in mind that for anything that HAS to be on the command line, you *cannot do it becase sun won't let you*.

The reason there are only three mentioned is that those were the only three I could find which Sun allows you to do - you can also do arbitrarily any application-specific stuff.

There are still a lot of problems with uploading files that make JGF close to unusable IMHO. Most important and already mentioned here: There seems to be no way to make a jar file first in the list nor is there a possibility to mark a jar as the "main"-jar. It doesn't matter if i upload my jars from A-Z or Z-A, the result is always a list with anything on top but my main jar. Is there actually an order in this list? I tried to upload the jar as aaaaa.jar to see, if this will place it on top...but i don't know yet, because the site just stopped responding while uploading (and is still down...which is another problem of JGF).Third problem (present since day one): The list of the jars shows a lot of jars multiple times and, best of all, they appear multiple times in the jnlp too. I got a list with 6 instances of lwjgl.jar. 5 were marked as "All OS", 1 as "Windows"!? If i delete one, they all go away. If i upload it again, it appears multiple times...at least that true for some jars (mainly lwjgl_XXX.jar) but not for others??And the final one: The HTML sources are still full of rants against almost anybody (Microsoft, Apache.org, MySQL...). Where's the sense in that? Especially when running a site that works as unrealiable as JGF, one should be quite about the (felt) mistakes that others are making.My usual update process for Paradroidz looks like this: Create jars, zips and exes locally. Upload them to my own site. Update the corresponding html-page. Done for my own site.Go to JGF, create a new release, upload my files, tear my hair out why it just doesn't work, upload my files multiple times (using a dial-in connection, which is a real pain), see JGF crash, wait some hours/days until it's up again, upload again...pray. If it wasn't for the community idea, i wouldn't use JGF. It's a pain to use it in its current state.

There are still a lot of problems with uploading files that make JGF close to unusable IMHO.

It's pretty awful at the moment particularly because of the untraced memory leak which causes it to crash every 24 hours (average). At the moment, I'm just trying to keep the main site live as much as I can until I can take some holiday from work and sit down for a few days solid and try and fix the two critical problems (as well as the mem leak, there is a once-a-month deadlock between two threads trying to read from the DB).

The deadlock problem is fairly straightforward - I've got the thread + monitor traces etc - but the once-a-day loss of all memory is the one that has to be solved first.

Thanks for the comments. I'm only sorry that right now I have absolutely no time to spend on JGF. A lot of how it works at the moment needs to be rethought - but there was no widely used standard for JWS deployment to copy in the first place, so I was making up most of the UI etc as I went along, no matter how hard I tried to do it intelligently the first time. On the plus side, when I do have more time (hopefully in the new year when we've got more staff at work), I now have very good ideas on what to fix and how.

That's how I get around problem, too. But still, I need to upload lwjgl.jar and lwjgl_devil.jar along with my whole jar. Maybe it wouldn't be so difficult just to select one "main" jar among all uploaded?Of course, when you find time, blah...

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